Ritual Magic (Magic in History) (New)

Description

"Butler's survey is the classic scholarly treatment of a tradition that extends from the later Middle Ages into the early Modern era: the tradition of texts that teach ceremonial magicians how to conjure good or evil spirits." -- Richard Kieckhefer

Occult knowledge and practice can be divided into three main branches: Astrology, which aims to guide human fortune by means of foreknowledge; Alchemy, which tries to secure power through the agency of the philosopher's stone; and Ritual Magic, which seeks to control the spirit world. In this classic book (first published in 1949), Butler explores ritual magic using a wide range of texts from the pre-Christian rites of the Akkadians and Chaldeans to the Solomonic Clavicles of medieval Europe. Throughout, there is extensive quotation from the documents themselves, providing the reader with an authentic sense of the richness and power of these texts.

Butler also examines the careers of noted magicians of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, the history of ceremonial magic in England, the myth of Satanism, and the rituals involved in the Faustian pact with the devil. Ritual Magic is essential reading for all interested in the history of magic and in the way magic traditions have altered as they move from culture to culture and from century to century.

A lavishly packaged, two-volume box set containing the most faithful and accurate versions of John Dee's journals ever published. This is a must-have treasure for Dee aficionados and esoteric scholars who absolutely need the most meticulously detailed version of these highly influential works. A labor of love twenty years in the making, these volumes include transcripts of four manuscripts from the British Library and one from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Two of these manuscripts have never b...More

"As long as we lie to ourselves, the Trickster will be with us.
He'll show up just when we least want him, to embarrass us on a
first date, to prove us fools in front of the learned company
we're trying to impress, to make us miss a power breakfast with
that all-important business contact."
- Richard Smoley, from the introduction

In November 1949, architect Frank Lloyd Wright announced the death of "the greatest man in the world," yet few knew who he was talking about. Enigmatic, misunderstood, declared a charlatan, and recently dubbed "the Rasputin who inspired Mary Poppins," Gurdjieff's life has become a legend. But who really was George Ivanovich Gurdjieff?

Employing the latest research and discoveries, including previously unpublished reminiscences of the real man, Tobias Churton investigates the truth beneath th...More

As the governor of the Dead and the burial ground, the Baron Samedi is one of the most distinctive and potent loa of Haitian Vodou. An imposing figure in black raiment, he is most often pictured as a corpse. His other magical domains, less discussed in esoteric literature, include disruption, obscenity and -- importantly for the practicing sorcerer -- not only the arts of Magic but the very fabric of which it is made.

Emergent from the spiritual crossroads of traditional Vodou and English w...More